Romeo muses over his lady love Juliet just before he gets bad news in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet, 1996.

Recently, through an accident of technology absent information other than my taste in general – not shuffle – Jane’s Addiction‘s Classic Girl and Radiohead‘s Talk Show Host played one after the other from the card in my car. It was like when you and your current partner (Radiohead) bump into your former flame (Jane’s Addiction) and you see why you like/d them both, but the flaws in the one make the other… You’re happy in your current situation, and now have critical insights on who you were and what that other relationship meant back in the day.

People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp. She says, “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.” Though that sentence shouldn’t bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I’m eighteen and it’s December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which had looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair’s clean tight jeans and her pale-blue T-shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence.

Technically, I wasn’t late to see Get Out. Like my all-time favorite movie Fight Club, in the months leading up to its release, Get Out was somewhere in the back of my mind where I knew very little about it other than that the teaser images looked very, very good, very intriguing. So, as I happened to with Fight Club, I saw Get Out on opening night. And then again later that week. What!?

My favorite thing about Get Out is the way that it taints the “Good ThingsTM“. It questions – as we should – the provenance, purpose, maintenance, and significance of leafy suburbs, interest in Black lives, and everything (milk and cereal, tea services, slacks, basements, hats, TV sets, law enforcement, the UNCF slogan…) in between.

When I was in high school, Boca Raton got independent films – only at Shadowood – well after they’d been released in Los Angeles, New York, and other ‘major’ cities. Although every once in a while Miami was on the ‘major’ cities list, back then, for me to go to there to see indie movies was a logistical impossibility. So, I would read about a movie in Harper’s Bazaar or Spin and then I’d obsessively check for its openings and showtimes in XS, South Florida’s alternative weekly magazine.1 That’s how I found and saw My Own Private Idaho.

PJ Harvey performing England Live at The Troxy, London UK on February 28, 2011

PJ Harvey is, to me, the Platonic Artist. There’s a discipline to her work that I respect; experimental and rigorous and meaningful, no two albums are alike, yet I hear her fascinations and compulsions spiral out over years and songs. While my favorite album of hers is White Chalk, her magnum opus (to date) is Let England Shake.2 In it, she’s perfected an earnest voice and a sound that echoes the past even as it is raw and unvarnished in the way that’s expected of a certain type of contemporary music. Listening to the song England in the car today unlocked for me Polly Jean‘s gift for songwriting.

I’ve became obsessed with two music videos. Neither is particularly new; albums with both songs were released in 2014 and 2015 respectively. And, although I came across them this past summer, sometimes it takes a while for things to take root. So, it wasn’t until the fall, when culture revives, that these songs became my referents. Fall in South Florida is verdant, bright, humid.1 These songs are stark. Both videos deal with space, technology, and feature blank whiteness and voids of black. Both videos have a solitary man as protagonist. It was a strange fall, to say the least. It haunts me. Sometime around the autumnal equinox, something slipped/tripped/stumbled, changed course.